Jonas Wechsler on Contemporary Issues in Computer Science

Last January, Netflix released the series Tidying Up With Marie Kondo , a reality show in which the host, Ms. Kondo, visits American households and advises the residents on de-cluttering. The show loosely follows the format of Kondo's book, The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. The show is generally well received and her book is a best-seller in Europe and Japan. Kondo's book is not about minimalism, and she states in her book that minimalism is not her goal, but the themes are similar. Though some readers have interpreted her writing as in favor of minimal ownership, I argue that her goal is not to help the reader own as little as possible, but to introduce the reader to some specific elements of eastern philosophy (Martin). In particular, the success of Kondo's media has, under the lens of consumerism, introduced some select Shinto and Buddhist practices to the western mainstream, such as animism, meditation, and mindfulness. Animism is the belief that objects have ...

Under the Obama administration, the use of drone strikes increased in Pakistan increased substantially (Drone). In his first year in office, the number of attacks increased from 36 to 54, and again to 122 the year after that (Drone). Initially, these attacks did not garner much scrutiny from the general public, probably because of the death of Osama bin Laden and the devastation of the al-Qaeda network. White house officials at the time stated that, while the government was rapidly expanding the use of drones, they were not trying to create a network of war machines reaching to every corner of the globe, as some believed (Miller). Since 2011, the number of drone strikes has steadily decreased and almost vanished (Drone). However, 500-1000 civilians, about 200 children, and 3 Americans were killed in the attacks (Serle). Of the 2,379 dead, 84 were confirmed members of Al-Qaeda, and of the 704 identified, only 295 were confirmed to be members of a terrorist group (Serle). A study at Sta...

Cyber attacks pose an increasingly large threat to US security. Donald Trump has declared a national emergency regarding threats along the border with Mexico, though a recent Worldwide Threat Assessment from Daniel Coats, the US Director of National Intelligence barely mentions border security. Instead, it emphasizes cyber threats from Russia, China, and to a degree North Korea and Iran. The public should understand the nature of these threats, and what they can do to protect themselves. One facet of cyber attacks is large, temporarily disruptive attacks on critical infrastructure. For example, China has the ability to disrupt a natural gas pipeline for days or weeks (Coats, 5). Russia has the ability to disrupt electrical grids for a few hours, which they have previously done to the Ukraine in 2015 and 2016 (Coats, 6). Moscow is currently mapping out US infrastructure for this purpose. Iran has been preparing to disrupt large corporate networks, which they have previously done to ...

I don't particularly believe that developers have the ability to inform the general public. If you have uninformed friends and family you can explain things to them, but in general people get their information from the news and other media. There are some exceptions to this, of course: Professor Scott Aaronson has written many posts on Quantum Computing on his very successful blog Shtetl-Optimized . He's also guest written for Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal , a geeky webcomic. However, these are mostly frequented by people who are already familiar with computer science. If you really want to protect the interests of consumers, I think we need to expand our right to privacy and freedom of speech to include technological privacy, security, and access to information. In the United States, we have a well established right to privacy. This protects against violation of solitude and private affairs, as well as public exposure to embarrassing private facts (Prosser). This sh...